Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas
explored in a literary work.
Alienation as a Form of Self-Protection
Throughout the novel, Holden seems to be excluded from
and victimized by the world around him. As he says to Mr. Spencer,
he feels trapped on “the other side” of life, and he continually
attempts to find his way in a world in which he feels he doesn’t
belong.
As the novel progresses, we begin to perceive
that Holden’s alienation is his way of protecting himself. Just
as he wears his hunting hat (see “Symbols,” below) to advertise
his uniqueness, he uses his isolation as proof that he is better
than everyone else around him and therefore above interacting with
them. The truth is that interactions with other people usually confuse
and overwhelm him, and his cynical sense of superiority serves as
a type of self-protection. Thus, Holden’s alienation is the source
of what little stability he has in his life.
As readers, we can see that Holden’s alienation
is the cause of most of his pain. He never addresses his own emotions
directly, nor does he attempt to discover the source of his troubles.
He desperately needs human contact and love, but his protective
wall of bitterness prevents him from looking for such interaction.
Alienation is both the source of Holden’s strength and the source
of his problems. For example, his loneliness propels him into his
date with Sally Hayes, but his need for isolation causes him to
insult her and drive her away. Similarly, he longs for the meaningful
connection he once had with Jane Gallagher, but he is too frightened
to make any real effort to contact her. He depends upon his alienation,
but it destroys him.
The Painfulness of Growing Up
According to most analyses, The Catcher in the
Rye is a bildungsroman, a novel about a young character’s
growth into maturity. While it is appropriate to discuss the novel
in such terms, Holden Caulfield is an unusual protagonist for a
bildungsroman because his central goal is to resist the process
of maturity itself. As his thoughts about the Museum of Natural
History demonstrate, Holden fears change and is overwhelmed by complexity.
He wants everything to be easily understandable and eternally fixed,
like the statues of Eskimos and Indians in the museum. He is frightened
because he is guilty of the sins he criticizes in others, and because
he can’t understand everything around him. But he refuses to acknowledge
this fear, expressing it only in a few instances—for example, when
he talks about sex and admits that “[s]ex is something I just don’t
understand. I swear to God I don’t” (Chapter 9).
Instead of acknowledging that adulthood scares and mystifies him,
Holden invents a fantasy that adulthood is a world of superficiality
and hypocrisy (“phoniness”), while childhood is a world of innocence,
curiosity, and honesty. Nothing reveals his image of these two worlds
better than his fantasy about the catcher in the rye: he imagines
childhood as an idyllic field of rye in which children romp and
play; adulthood, for the children of this world, is equivalent to
death—a fatal fall over the edge of a cliff. His created understandings
of childhood and adulthood allow Holden to cut himself off from
the world by covering himself with a protective armor of cynicism.
But as the book progresses, Holden’s experiences, particularly his
encounters with Mr. Antolini and Phoebe, reveal the shallowness
of his conceptions.
The Phoniness of the Adult World
“Phoniness,” which is probably the most famous
phrase from The Catcher in the Rye, is one of Holden’s
favorite concepts. It is his catch-all for describing the superficiality,
hypocrisy, pretension, and shallowness that he encounters in the
world around him. In Chapter 22, just before
he reveals his fantasy of the catcher in the rye, Holden explains that
adults are inevitably phonies, and, what’s worse, they can’t see their
own phoniness. Phoniness, for Holden, stands as an emblem of everything
that’s wrong in the world around him and provides an excuse for
him to withdraw into his cynical isolation.
